Living Wittily

Autumn, Compost and Living Towards God

Autumn is one of the hinge seasons of the year, a turning from summer to winter through the slow process of maturation, fruitfulness and letting go. As a boy I helped my dad run a market garden sized greenhouse, growing and selling pot plants, many of them grown from cuttings. The compost was home made, a combination of soil (often collected from molehills in the spring), river gravel from the Nith, peat and finally leaf mould.

The leaf mould came from one of the woods within walking distance of our cottage, that layer of rich, rotted humus accumulated over years and years of shed leaves, which felt like the richest pile carpet you ever walked on. With a hessian sack, a small riddle and a pair of old leather gloves I would happily go and collect a bag of leaf mould, riddled under the branches of beech, lime, oak, sycamore, elm and rowan trees. The smell of rich composting vegetation still creates for me images of a boyhood spent in fields, woods, by riverbanks, hills and small lochans.

This time of year is an evocative month or two when, despite all the changes to the countryside, I walk in a state of moderate wonder-looking, or in the words of John's Gospel, 'beholding', 'gazing' and 'contemplating', the range of colours in trees on the turn. Leaf mould is a benevolent legacy, a gift from previous years, a store that nourishes and gives life beyond its own life. Each autumn, another downpayment to the fertility of our earth and its soil. One of the lessons learned in boyhood, but not realised till later life is the slowness and hiddenness of those layers of leaves, gently decaying into a medium for new life.

In my mind perhaps a similar process takes place. Ideas that years ago seemed so gripping, real and certain, mellow into a maturing compost of thought, memory, experience and a restfulness no longer needing such gripping certainty, and content with a wondering thoughtfulness I take to be wisdom. Not the resignation of 'all passion spent', as if nothing mattered much any more. Rather, an intellectual steadiness and spiritual humility that looks on the world not as a competition to be won, but a game to be played, a play to be performed, a score to be improvised using as much of ourselves and our gifts and our hard learned skills as we can bring to it.

It's over half a century since I went for sacks of leaf mould. I trust that over those intervening decades my thoughts and feelings, ideas and emotions, decisions and choices, words and silences, tears and actions, have settled like falling leaves onto the compost that is my life. And year on year that topsoil supplemented by the rich materials of a life lived so far as grace and love allow, towards God.

Because I Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus, I Believe in Forgiveness

There are some writers on Christian life and human existence who are invariably good, and reading them just as invariably does you good. For me Timothy Radcliffe is one such writer, and I came across these words of his, quoted in Stanley Hauerwas' slim volume of sermons, A Cross Shattered Church.

"If forgiveness were forgetting then God would have to suffer the most acute amnesia, but it is God's unimaginable creativity, which takes what we have done and makes it fruitful. The medieval image of God's forgiveness was the flpowering of the cross. The cross is the ugly sign of torture. It is the sign of humanity's ability to refect love and to do what is utterly sterile. But the artists of the middle ages showed this cross flowering on Easter Sunday. The dead wood put out tendrils and flowers. Forgiveness makes the dead live and the ugly beautiful."

Whatever else we can complain about in the news just now, death and ugliness seem to dominate the headlines.

So I want to hear the counter claims of people of faith, that grace is beautiful, that forgiveness beautifies, that mercy makes life possible once again.

I want to hear love defiant enough to claim that compassion is not weakness but strength, that hope is not irresponsible optimism but responsible and determined trust that God's power is redemptive, ultimately and remorselessly redemptive.

I want to hear a faith so confident in the reconciling heart of God that every act of compassion, forgiveness, mercy and self-giving is performed as an intentional and persistent gesture of redemption, an aligning of our hearts with God, in love, purpose and determination that Creation will not die.

Why? Because we believe in resurrection, in life defying death, in love eclipsing hate, in peace persuading violence to desist, in forgiveness denying to enmity its raison d'etre, and in life. Yeds, as resurrection people we believe in life.

This I want to hear - and unless the preaching of the church takes up these vast truths of redemption and reconciliation,we trivialise the Gospel we are called to proclaim, we abandon our privileged role as ambassadors of Christ the Reconciler, and in a world so fragmented and jagged-edged from its own brokenness we will lose the right to be heard as those who bring something entirely different, hope-filled and redolent of new possibility. ASnd what we bring is Good News, crucified love blossming as resurrected hope.

Where there is no vision and all that? When Visions Are Not Fit For Purpose!

I get tired of the word vision. Whether it's in a personal development seminar, or a question about the future of the organisation, or the word wheeled out in the church community to help us be more forward, outward, upward and not backward looking - the word wearies me. It seems to suggest that the way things are is never enough. It invites, or rather demands, that I look for ways to make things different, to see things in a new way; it is a word that seems to work best in a place where there is already discontent, where the status quo is not enough.

I know, "Where there is no vision the people perish...." and all that. Leaving aside the risks of simply yanking those words from their biblical context, there is nothing intrinsically good about a vision. It depends on whose vision it is, the content and motivation, the energy and resources, and even the level of achievability implied in the vision statements.

Oh yes we need vision. I'm not weary of those inner longings of the heart, those spiritual flights of imagination that take us to possible new places. I'm not tired of the hard work of thinking, praying, conversing, arguing, planning and formulating new ideas, that push us towards a new way of seeing the world, creating ideas that inspire, energise, and give cohesion to communities hungering and thirsting after righteousness; such hungering and thirsting I take to mean wanting a world made more right, thirsting for an economics made more just, feeling hunger pangs for a community determinedly more porous to others, a view of people of other faiths not as enemies, or rivals, or competitors (the language of combative economics again), but communities whose vision is shaped and expanded, contained and fulfilled in filled-fulness by Jesus who goes before us. I mean giving first place to Jesus in whom the fullness of God dwells, through whom God seeks the reconciliation of all things, whose crucifixion is our call to carry the cross, whose "Follow me" remains our categorical imperative, and whose resurrection bursts the bounds of possibility in all our vision making - He is the One who is ahead of us, who is the fons et origo of every transformative vision we can think of, and the One who urges us beyond every vision statement we can formulate. 

It's the devaluing of the word vision I guess that makes me weary. We use the word for the latest good ideas; or the in fashion ways of doing things; or as the word that claims the high ground for our own plans and agendas. And we do this in churches, the very place where Jesus crucified and risen is the Head of all things. Unless our visions aspire towards that great vision of a healed creation, a reconciled universe, a new reality defined by shalom and pervaded by a love deeper than the abysses of our own dreaming and more durable than our own hopes, then they will run out of fuel before they even reach the edges of what we hope for.

Vision is related to a theology of hope. Vision is what happens when we think with God on the horizon. Vision is such impatience with the status quo that nothing less than faith in the One who says "Behold I make all things new", will come within range of our longed for possibilities. For me Gaza has been an exercise in both realism and hopefulness; realism because I've no idea how to prevent that vicious, lethal cycle of hate from exploding again; hopefulness because I refuse, as a Christian steadfastly refuse, to cede the field to the powers that be, whoever they are.

Against the benchmarks of ancient hatred, political determinism, iron-clad vested interests, idolatry of the bomb and the gun and the rocket and the tank, discourse which sanitises evil with the vocabulary of collateral damage, human shields and terrorist madness, against all those as a Christian I do not rail, I pray. And I envision, not within the so limited scale of my own thinking and hoping and longing, but within the great vision of the Gospel of peace and reconciliation. I dare to believe that the Holy Spirit is God's self-gift to the world, moving with renewing and redeeming power within the structures of what we call reality; that Jesus Christ embodies the love and mercy of God taking on the worst the world can do, and emerging through suffering to resurrection which contradicts all that our human worst can do; that God's purposes for his creation are purposes that are ultimately, finally and irrevocably redemptive.

Maybe, just maybe, as well as all the practical things we desperately try to do - from buying Palestinian oil to speaking with our Jewish friends; from gift aid to charities committed to shalom purposes to making sure we are informed enough to take on the nonsense and sometimes dangerous nonsense spoken around us - as well as these, being a faithful follower of the crucified risen Jesus means being realistic about the worlds we live in - a world where crucifixion was not final, and resurrection realised the impossible possibility that death and the dealers of death don;t have the last word. 

 

R S Thomas: Mysticism and Meeting God on the Moor

We all meet God in our own way. There are moments of recognition that, brief as they are, touch those deepest longing we find it hard to name. In the encounter with God it is seldom clear whether we mee God or God meets us, and in any case, to make such a distinction risks missing the mystery that challenges all such certainties.

Years ago, I sat at coffee with a man who was recovering from a stroke. He was as unmystical as anyone I ever met. Down to earth, a man of good humoured shrewdness, lived for his family and worked hard all his life to m,ake things happen for them, his own unapologetic self-description, a working man.  He spoke of his time as a telephone engineer in Orkney, laying cables across the moorland, and one day, unbidden, unexpected and unexplained, he was aware of the presence of God. And he knew. He knew he was known, and by Whom. His life, he said, was never the same after that. He remembered the cold wind, the cry of curlews, the unthreatening loneliness, and most of all the space.

We talked a while about God, moorland, the cry of moorland birds, and the way that emptiness can suddenly be filled with presence. We agreed that the cry of the curlew is one of the most beautiful sounds in Scotland, a combination of longing and the cry of the heart that opens us up to the incredible.

At such moments of opening, I believe in the democratisation of mysticism, and the need to stop categorising and defining what in the end is the interruption of our lives by the God who invests those rare moments with transcendent significance. So in  one sense my friend was unmystical - in another sense this most practical of men was alert to the invasion of gift, responsive to the call of God, and spoke only in quiet humility of what had happened to him. God had happened to him - and it is the sharing of such spiritual reality that is one of the most persuasive encouragements for the rest of us. We too have had our moments.  

The Moor

It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God there was made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In a movement of the wind over grass.
 
There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart’s passions — that was praise
Enough; and the mind’s cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.

God's Passion to Multiply Joy

Two sentences from P T Forsyth, This Life and the Next - showing why it's always wise to read him with a pencil to underline and retrace our footsteps to such throwaway theological sense..... the photo is from Scolty Hill looking towards Aberdeen, where Forsyth was born. Wonder if he did his hill-waliking around here?

"We were created by God not out of his poverty and his need of company, but out of his overflowing wealth of love and his passion to multiply joy."

"The pursuit of perfection is a greater moral influence than the passion for power."

Developing a Beatitudinal Worldview

Maya Angelou secretes wisdom. Time and again I read her and am gently rebuked for my unwisdom. "When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed". I've often thought about starting an anthology of Beatitudes. Not to replace or displace those of Jesus, but to expand them, expound them, and explain them. The best writers know about beatitude, and the wisest of them know that happiness happens, and is as much undeserved gift as achieved goal. The contemporary "O How happy are..." as an alleged improvement on "Blessed are", is redolent with the superficial, the self-concerned, as if hedonism is a good thing.

And beatitudes are not platitudes. They are wisdom statements, they indicate the life conditions under which happiness is more likely to flourish; they commend inner dispositions and outward actions that make us receptive to what comes our way, and to see it as blessing. The happenings of life are viewed through a specific lens, a sense of the mercy and love of God as pervasive, mysterious, uncontrollable, a very cataract of circumstance and happenstance that leaves us deluged in blessing.

It happened to Denise Levertov and she captured it in her poem "To live in the mercy of God"

To live in the mercy of God.

To feel vibrate the enraptured

 

           waterfall flinging itself

           unabating down and down

                                         to clenched fists of rock.

           Swiftness of plunge,

           hour after year after century,

                                                      O or Ah

           uninterrupted, voice

           many-stranded.

                                          To breathe

           spray. The smoke of it.

                                           Arcs

           of steelwhite foam, glissades

           of fugitive jade barely perceptible. Such passion -

           rage or joy?

                                          Thus not mild, not temperate,

           God's love for the world. Vast

           flood of mercy

                                flung on resistance.

 

The thunder of many waters, the diamond glinted spray of millions of litres, and the irridescence of constant, inexhaustible, life-giving liquid hurling downwards in a symphony of praise and splendour, is a powerful expression of the eternal mercy of God, in whose life and love we are each caught up. As Peter, an early exponent of the beatitudinal form wrote: "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who in his great mercy has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead...."

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life...that is a beatitudinal worldview, and a call to a lifestyle in which, as Maya Angelou says, "we give cheerfully and receive gratefully....". Harder to find a more succinct description of the blessed life. 

The Psalms of Smudge 1. O Rest in the Lord

 

I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, Lord, only makest me dwell in safety.

The Silent Presence of God and Spiritual Complacency

Thomas Merton remains one of my spiritual mentors: time and again I hear a voice of compassionate rebuke, patient understanding and in a tone of self deprecating modesty. Often enough for me it is a needed corrective, a recovery of perspective which a too driven Baptist needs to consider on the advice of a Cistercian who died nearly 50 years ago.

 

"If our life is poured out in useless words,

     we will never hear anything,

          will never become anything,

              and in the end,

                  because have said everything before we had anything to say,

                          we will be left speechless."

 

"The world our words have attempted to classify, to control,

and even to despise because they could not contain it, comes close to us,

for silence teaches us to know reality by respecting it where words have defiled it.

 

When we have lived long enough alone with the reality around us,

our veneration will learn how to bring forth a few good words about it

from the silence which is the mother of Truth."

 

These words are from Thoughts in Solitude, an early intense series of meditations Merton later felt were overstated, idealistic and betraying his early over earnestness. But actually some of the most important spiritual writings are forged in the heat of enthusiasm, and what they lose in moderation and maturity and consistency, they gain by reflecting real and immediate experience that challenges our spiritual status quo, which too often has settled into unsurprised complacency, emotional comfort and a self-serving pursuit of spiritual bargains. Bargains are by definition something worthwhile which we get on the cheap. Spiritual growth and maturity cannot be had on the cheap. Merton was far too self-knowing not to recognise the short cut, the body swerve, the consumer mindset, the natural evasiveness about the demands of God that were a trait in himself. And in pointing out such inner bias he helps us recognise them in ourselves, and then to see more clearly, speak more humbly, and learn again the silence of the heart.

Merton encourages a pursuit of spiritual maturity that is less self-conscious and more focused outwardly on the reality of God, the activity of the Holy Spirit and the living presence of the Risen Christ. Waiting in silence, hoping in the quietness, trusting in the peacefulness, of the Triune God. Activist spirituality is by definition impatient, pragmatic, results tested and evidence based. Integrated silence, contemplative prayer, welcoming the presence of God, and being welcomed by God, seated in hospitality at the table with the Triune God, has no empirical evidence we can point to or demonstrate. Nor should it. God is to be loved for God's self, and whatever else intentional inner and outer silence is, it is an act of love, to pay attention, to adore, to worship. 

Ancient texts and Digital Photos

 

He leads me beside still waters: He restores my soul....

Devotions by photograph often works for me! Especially when the photo carries with it memories of significant moments.

In more reflective moments of whimsical "what ifs" I wonder what the Gospels might have looked like if they had been illustrated with photos taken by Peter or Mary. 

How good would a time delay photo series have been in those key moments at Cana when water became wine, huh?

Or if one of the Magi had taken a few holiday snaps of the living conditions of ordinary people in Bethlehem?

Then, what if Mary Magdalene had used her smartphone to snap the gardener early in the morning?

More seriously, the juxtaposition of personally taken photos with personally significant texts is just one other possibility for a contemplative hermeneutic.

As I look for ways of slowing down, paying attention, thinking thoughtfully rather than rapidly, I am finding music, paintings and now photos provide occasions of prayerfulness.